Saturday, 13 August 2011

Crawfish

When I was a kid and to this day I have taken a pretty dim view of my brother's choice in music, it's pish. He has a Boyzone cd for christ's sake!

As a teenager I used to dream about going in and taking a 50 pence piece to his Chris De Burgh collection, If I had to to endure Patricia The Stripper or A (fucking) Spaceman Came Travelling through the Gyprock and Anaglypta once I must have heard them a thousand times. I never carried out the vandalism I thought about but the little git did do the very same thing to my Crass, Christ The Album which I only realised years later as it is not the sort of album that anybody in their right mind would play on a regular basis.

Anyway, another of my brother's favourites from a very young age was Elvis and as somebody trying to live up to the ideals of punk all I had was disdain for the man in rhinestones and sideboards that were a mile out. I remember every time an Elvis Presley film came on the telly we had to watch it. It was usually a bank holiday weekend or Boxing day that these delights were shown on the telly in the 70s and there was always something better on STV, like Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger but we had to bloody watch Elvis. I fucking hated these films, even then I knew that the acting was crap, the stories were all the same, Elvis sees girl, Elvis gets girl, Elvis pisses girl off but at the end always ends up with girl again, oh and Elvis sings a lot of shitty songs.

But there was one song from one film that always stuck in my mind as it wasn't shitty and Elvis didn't look like a twat when he sang it but looked like probably the coolest pesron I had ever seen in my life and was singing one of the most amazing, if brief songs that I had ever heard. Although being a self respecting punk and metal fan it was more than my life was worth to admit to liking this or anything by the King.

Years later, I realised just what I had been missing with my embargo in Presley's music when a friend gave me a loan of his copy of The Sun Sessions albums and I listened without prejudice to the boy from Tupelo.

However I still can not watch GI Blues and every time I hear Wooden Heart (my brother used to play it repeatedly) I want to set fire to wooden toys.

So here is mine and Joe Strummer's favourite Elvis tune, with more than a little help from Kitty White.